Howdy, I don't think I am seeing the whole thread here, so I may be commenting back to the wrong person. I have run local elections several times as the presiding election judge. In Texas, that is what they call the person who runs the election at the precinct level. I also do not trust most of the electronic voting systems. There are some good auditable ones out there, and I keep talking about those whenever I can. There are real benefits to the electronic systems and as long as we can keep transparency and auditability, then I say they are a good thing. It is kind of like the BIOS to me. It is not that I don't trust Award or Phoenix, but I like to option of an open honest BIOS and I think it will keep the others a little more honest. I have been looking for a good motherboard to try coreboot on and I look forward to using it. And for something off-topic, I tried the gNewSense 2.0 on two systems this weekend and it failed to install where Ubuntu went on fine. I am trying to figure out what was missing so I can file a bug report. Good day, Ralph Green, Jr.
Richard M Stallman wrote:
It isn't only software or firmware that's of concern. There should be no compromise: everything should be transparent and therefor auditable. (You doubt the importance of this for voting machines ?) See http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/01/1233244Voting machines are a very special case because you cannot trust the election authority to run them honestly. Using free software in these machines is not sufficient.
I do not trust computers for voting. Ballots should be on paper so that a recount is possible.